Something Different

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Variations on a Thought

I am having trouble conveying the feelings that I am having, the fact that I want to write, to keep writing, but cannot quite formulate exactly what I want to say. At the moment I am finding a deep release through music, either through live gigs or listening to albums as I drive across the northern landscape of the country I inhabit. Often, on a morning when I wake, I play the album in the CD player and wash myself in the tones of whoever is playing. It is a sweet relief. There is an immediate sense of feeling, of a placement on a particular chord or orchestral swell, that rush of recognition that can only come with time when reading the words of others. Yet I feel there is a deep kindred between these two methods of communication, two of the most important for me. Yes, of course we talk, we can express our desires, worries, love and anger through talking, we gesture too, we can laugh or howl with derision, but there is something in the beauty of the written word, in the musical note, that is lacking from the babble that vocalizes forth from the mouths of both myself and of others. What does this say about me? I am not quite sure I want to know, that maybe I value the thoughts and beliefs of others, but worry about giving a voice to my own? Perhaps.

This isn’t the piece or the time to give voice to such ill thought out ideas or half formed theories. I want to keep writing, I want you to keep reading, I want us both to keep being creative, to tap into that font of magic that cannot be commercialized, crunched down to size for productivity measures or customer service satisfaction. I feel in limbo, between the world of what is expected of us all as individuals, in a market where we have to pull our weight to feed our commercial gain, compared to a more utopian paradise where the value of a person is not placed on their output, or their labor. It is ridiculous to think of such thoughts, ridiculous to think that I am free to think such thoughts, to moan about a life well lived. But I do, we all do, no matter our position, social standing or inherent bias built into us. We are all individuals and we are all a collective. Together we love, destroy and displace.

I am having trouble writing. I am staring at the computer screen each and every day. It is, I realize with a disgusted shudder, a proxy for human interaction, for skin on skin. Yet still I come back for more, in the vain and vapid belief that this is a life well lived, that this is life itself. Humans need the company of the animals and plants, of the soil itself, to know that we do not share this planet alone amongst our kind. We are but one of many and I feel that this is forgotten more and more. Ignorance is bliss until the world collapses around ourselves, and we are left choking on the markers of productivity.

Death has become a familiar friend as of late, in this last year of my life. This may be the last year of my life, I hope it is not but we never quite know what is around the corner. Surely we should grab it, if we believe it is so? Yet still, I lie in bed an extra hour, to soak in the sonic variations and textural tones of the current album spinning in my CD player. Content to know that, for the time being, this is where I belong. My limbs relax, my eyes flutter and close, finally my breathing shallows. It is a mere shadow of true sexual ecstasy, but it is close.